Produced in a hands-on way by George Lucas, for whom it was a long- cherished project, this aerial adventure yarn is a tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen, the African-American fighter pilots who survived terrible prejudice, injustice and constant racist humiliation (including an official US army air corps report that blacks were congenitally unfit to fly planes) to play a heroic role in Europe during the second world war. A vital story that everyone should know about has been semi-fictionalised and adorned with every verbal and dramatic cliche known to Hollywood. Absurd and otiose sub-plots involve one of the flyers courting a Sicilian girl and another escaping from a German PoW camp and making a surprising appearance back at his Italian airbase. It's as if the makers thought the proper way to honour these courageous men was to treat them as if they were appearing in a 1944 propaganda movie, speaking the sanitised language demanded at the time by the Production Code. Why, one wonders, didn't Lucas persuade his friend Steven Spielberg to take on this subject and treat it with the authority and respect he brought to Band of Brothers?